Between Life and Death

by Ann Christy

  Today - Babysitting Monsters

  Charlie should be asleep since he had the third watch and only turned it over to me a few hours ago, yet it’s him that I see when I turn my head at the sound of footsteps. It’s so hot already that I feel like I’m cooking, so I’m lying down on the cool concrete to leach a little of the heat out of my body. If I turn over one more time to a new and cooler spot on the concrete floor, I’ll be officially a rotisserie.

  “I brought you some lunch,” he says, drawing closer. I sit up a little reluctantly when he grins at my starfish position on the floor.

  At his words, a rising chorus of sound issues from the cell of in-betweeners and I hear Emily shout, “Darlie! Play cardz!”

  He smiles over my head at Emily and I hear her peculiar, gurgling laugh in return. Her chains rattle a little, so I know she’s bouncing her hands like she does when she gets excited. She gets lonely in there sometimes and she’s always happy to see Charlie. With us sitting watch on the other cage, she’s had continuous company and it’s clear that she enjoys it.

  “Not just now, Emily. Can I talk to Veronica first?” he asks her. It’s nice that he always does that. I wonder what he would do if she said no. I bet he’d play cards and make me wait. That he’s so kind to her actually makes my stomach flutters worse. He’s becoming just the right kind of guy for a girl at the end of the world.

  “Yah, Yah. Dalk, dalk,” she answers in a sing-song voice. Then I hear her sink to the floor, probably sitting as close to us as she can, so that she can hear us and take part in the conversation.

  Charlie drops to the concrete next to me and hands me a big bowl of salad, only without lettuce because of the heat. It’s still bright and alive from just being picked and washed. Summer may be miserably hot, but at least the food is good. Dressing made from an abominable mix of whatever seasonings Savannah tosses together plus the smallest bit of oil and vinegar to give it some punch.

  I pluck out a piece of tomato, pop it in my mouth, then say, “Thanks! Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

  He snitches a chunk of cucumber from my bowl before I can smack his hand. “It’s too hot to sleep. I’ll just get a headache.”

  “You’ll get one staying awake too.”

  He grins at me and touches the tip of my nose quickly. “Can’t win for losing, can I?”

  “Nope,” I say, digging into my food.

  As I eat, he takes in the array of tiny bottles all around my nest and looks at my hands or, more specifically, at my fingernails. I waggle them at him between bites and he laughs. Now that I’ve lived through the apocalypse, I realize what a huge gap there was in how everyone imagined it. I’ve read all the books we have and what no one ever points out is that there is a great deal of boredom involved.

  At present, that boredom is enhanced because I mostly spend it watching a cage. So, I paint my fingernails. Today, I’m going for a more rainbow look. Black, red, pink, blue, purple. Even orange, which I find looks odd with the general dirtiness of the rest of me. Soon enough all the polish left in the world will go gummy and useless, but for now, I’m colorful and occupied.

  A whiff of breeze dribbles in through the bay doors and, as pathetic as it is, it feels like full-on air conditioning to me. Charlie lifts his head at it as well. Even Emily makes a small sound of pleasure behind us.

  He nods toward Emily’s cage and asks, “Do you think pulling down the barriers is helping with the heat? I feel like we’re cooking in here.”

  “Sure. It’s still hot, but at least the air is moving. I hope Gregory gets that solar expansion up with those little fans. That will help move more air,” I say, smearing some raw zucchini through the dressing at the bottom of the bowl, only to have it snatched by Charlie halfway to my mouth.

  He leans over and kisses me with his dressing-flavored lips. His breath smells of spices and cucumbers when he whispers, “It will stay hot no matter what we do as long as you’re around.”

  His grin is wide and very naughty, but that has to be the cheesiest thing I’ve ever heard, so I laugh. I kiss him back, adding my dressing and tomato flavored lips to the mix. Suddenly, the big warehouse doesn’t seem so hot anymore, but at the same time, very steamy indeed.

  “Gah, blech.” Emily is obviously not as enthralled by the way his lips are both soft and firm simultaneously. I break the kiss and look over my shoulder at her cage. She’s still sitting, but she’s stretched herself up to see over the short barrier that remains. Her hair is a mess, one of her braids having gone fuzzy and sweat making it look greasy at the crown. But there’s a smile on her face and it’s an even smile. A very human smile.

  At least for now it’s human.

  “So, I take that to mean you don’t approve,” I tease and her grin widens.

  “Nah, zokay,” she says with a wave of dismissal as if to tell us to carry on.

  Of course, that would be great, but she’s still watching. And she seems very interested. It sort of kills the mood. I glance at Charlie and he’s smirking. His eyebrows twitch upward, daring me to kiss him. So I do, but only quickly and I pull away before he has a chance to respond.

  “Gah,” Emily intones from behind us.

  “Yeah, blech,” I add, and she giggles.

  Charlie sighs his surrender and slides around on his butt to face the other cage. “Anything new?”

  I shake my head, unhappy to have to report that. It’s been two days since we injected them and I would expect more than we’ve seen so far. Instead of becoming vocal or more aware, the two injected in-betweeners have grown more silent. They’re sometimes responsive when food comes, but they lapse into something that I can only define as sleep between meals, their jaws slack and eyes closed. Since in-betweeners don’t sleep, I’m at a loss to decide if this is good or bad.

  Perhaps Charlie is thinking something along those same lines, because he picks up the file from Princeton and Violet. I’d been reading it again, trying to match our experience so far with the tests that they ran, but the situations are simply too different. Their subjects were more decayed, and the in-betweeners they tested were ones from the wild, their tests run outside and only partially observed.

  “What are you thinking?” he asks, shuffling the papers. I know he’s read and re-read them during his watches. The number of smudged fingermarks along the edges of the papers keep multiplying as each watchstander pours over the words yet again, looking for hope.

  “I don’t know what to think. I mean, I’m not sure I’d be prepared for one of them to wake up and ask for fries and a shake, but still…” I trail off there because I just don’t have the words to encompass everything I hope and fear.

  His hand reaches for mine and he gives it a squeeze. He really is the best post-apocalyptic boyfriend…ever.

  “I know. You want something—anything—to happen,” he says.

  I nod, tears of frustration and anticipated failure standing in my eyes. Behind me, Emily is humming a little tuneless song and it only serves to remind me how much I have emotionally invested in this. When I came back with the package and Charlie saw my excitement, he’d pulled me aside and cautioned me not to get ahead of myself, to look at this with reasonable optimism rather than getting my hopes up.

  I knew then that he meant well, but I also didn’t do as he’d cautioned. I’d been convinced it would work and didn’t have room for anything else in my head or my heart. I wish I would have approached this with less emotional certainty.

  Charlie holds me while I cry, one arm around my shoulder and my head tucked into his chest. It’s too hot for this much closeness and I can feel the foggy heat building between us, but I need the emotional comfort more than the physical.

  Emily grows silent as I cry, either because she’s gotten bored and fallen into that inactive state that passes for sleep, or because she’s fascinated with what’s going on. I think her tumor must be gone by now—or at least as gone as I can ever be sure of—but her brain is still recovering from the trauma. She understand
s things, but it’s a more simplistic sort of understanding. I can see her piecing bits of her memories and knowledge together when she sees something new, or something that rings a bell from her past.

  “Wait, did you hear that?” Charlie says, his hand moving from my shoulder to my jaw, as if to silence the snuffling sounds of my crying.

  I don’t hear anything other than his heartbeat and my own misery, but I lift my head to listen all the same. I hear nothing. Well, nothing except the incessant sounds the untreated in-betweeners make even through their gags and face coverings.

  Charlie leans forward a little, one ear cocked toward the in-betweener cage and his eyes roaming in that way people who are listening closely for something often do. I listen too, watching him for cues.

  He starts and whispers, “There!”

  I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary, but he disentangles himself from me to stand and walk toward the cage. He leans close and peers through the chain-link to the place where we have the two treated in-betweeners strapped to their desktops. He slips his flashlight out of his belt and points it toward the dim interior.

  I realize this is poor timing, but the way he does these things is incredibly distracting. He has no idea how effortlessly sexy he is. The way he bends his arm and wrist to point the flashlight screams confidence and suppressed motion. This would have been utterly unremarkable in our previous life, but now, well…he’s a pin-up for the new age. The boy-band member of a new era in which young men wield hammers or axes instead of guitars or microphones.

  “Holy shit!” he says, then flinches. He doesn’t curse as a regular thing, mostly because Gloria will whack him with a spoon if she hears it, but it slips out now and again. He looks back at me with a nervous grin, but I’m already getting to my feet, my tears forgotten.

  He shines the light into the cage for me and I see Tiny, the littlest of the in-betweeners. His eyes are open and squinting at the light shining in his face. That by itself is enough to tell me that something has altered inside him, because in-betweeners don’t react to things like light in their eyes. They would just charge at it.

  Then his lips quiver and move, some small breathy sounds almost lost in the general noise of the three untreated in-betweeners. Then, as if with great effort, a single long, slow word escapes his lips.

  “Help.”

  Eleven Weeks Ago - Smoke

  It’s there again. The column of smoke is dying away, so I know whoever is out there has put out their fire now that dawn is arriving.

  I hand the binoculars back to Gregory and he peers at the dissipating smoke for a long moment. He’s the last one to look, but we all wait for him to finish. Every adult except Gloria is up on the roof this morning, Charlie waking us all in time to come up for the pre-dawn twilight.

  Gregory sighs, lowers the glasses, and turns to us with a grim expression. “That’s the fourth day in a week.”

  Charlie nods and says, “For a total of eight sightings. Every time it’s in a slightly different place.”

  Savannah is gnawing at her thumbnail, which she always does when she’s nervous. She pauses her gnawing just long enough to make a little gesture, her fingers spreading in a wave and her head shaking in a way that says, ‘And what does that mean?’

  I feel Charlie’s eyes on me in the gloom and I know what he’s thinking. Matt speaks up before either of us has a chance.

  “Someone followed you back,” he says. There’s no accusation in his words. It’s only a matter-of-fact statement. Even so, I feel my hackles rise and a defensive response form in my head.

  Charlie must see it coming, because he quickly tosses in, “No one knew where we were going or where we came from except Violet and that nanite guy, Princeton. It could be coincidence. This is a city, people will come here.”

  Gregory gives him a look because that’s a stretch, but Matt says, “True. But the timing is odd, wouldn’t you say?”

  I have to say something, defensive or not. “Would the doctor have come after us? I don’t think so. Let’s be logical about this. They didn’t have enough people as it was. We’re just two kids and probably not clear of nanites anyway. If he wanted to collect humans, he could have just searched his own area. We may not see them, but there are people hidden everywhere. It doesn’t pass the smell test. It can’t be him.”

  Gregory nods as I speak, so I must be making some sort of sense, but Matt—as always—thinks the worst and says, “Still.”

  Pulling her thumb away from her mouth and jamming her hands into her pockets, Savannah finally pipes up. “She’s right. It’s too much distance for it to be worth it for that crazy guy to come after them. Whoever they are, they’re putting their fires out and keeping on the move, so they’re smart. They’re probably looking for supplies or a good place to live.”

  “Or some sort of authority,” I say.

  “Or on their way to the coast,” Charlie adds.

  Matt grunts at that, a concession, I think.

  There’s really only one question we have to answer, so I ask it. “Should we go look?”

  No one answers for a moment, then Matt says, “Next time we go to check the sign, I think we should take an extra day and go check it out. Maybe bring an extra person.”

  Charlie nods and says, “I’ll go with. That’ll leave Gregory and Savannah to take care of things here. They’re our best shots.”

  “No, we need a good shot to go with us,” I say. At Charlie’s expression, I add, “No offense. You’re really good too.”

  “Gregory can go with you. I’ll stay behind,” Matt says. I can’t decide if he’s offering because he’d like to put a little distance between Savannah and Gregory—they’ve been getting a little too cozy and making some of us uncomfortable—or because he can’t tolerate the idea of going anywhere with his brother. It’s probably a bit of both.

  “Fine,” I say. That’s two days from now. Let’s hope they keep having fires at night so we can keep track of them.

  *****

  The thunderstorms were welcome when they came, the water sheeting down from the roofs and filling our barrels until they overflowed, but I’m glad that they’re over on the morning we head out. The air is a little cooler, the winds from the north instead of the more normal southwest. The downside of that is that the smell of our waste trenches blows directly toward the warehouses and bathes us in it. At least the water has diluted the stench a little.

  I’m actually glad to go, so that I can get away from the smell until the wind changes back to normal and it dies back some.

  We’ve got to bash in a dozen heads before we can open the gate, the storms having kept us away from the fences for the past two days. It’s a mess, but the prolonged dousing means even the deaders are a little less disgusting.

  Once we’re on the road, we ride for no more than an hour before an in-betweener rushes at us from the shelter of a small strip of businesses. He’s fast, but old, his skin a mottled mess and his belly a mass of scar tissue of the type that nanites build.

  “Incoming,” I shout and brake my bike, swinging my crossbow to the front. My wrist is still braced from being dislocated, but the hard material makes a great prop for my bow while my finger finds the trigger by instinct.

  Gregory and Charlie brake their bikes with successive squeaks and squeals of rubber and metal, and I loose the bolt as soon as I check that they’re clear. The in-betweener is moving fast, his gait unsteady, but no less speedy, so my bolt hits off center, piercing it’s forehead above one eye and poking through above his ear.

  He barely breaks stride, but his attention is fully focused on me now. I yank my machete from the front basket of my bike. There’s no time to be jerking around with my crossbow now and a hammer isn’t going to cut it. In-betweeners like this, the kind that no longer retreat from injury, can only be stopped by force.

  It’s chopping time.

  “A little help here,” I shout.

  Gregory looses a bolt before I’m even done with my
shout and it seems to magically spring from the in-betweener’s forehead, this time a clean through-and-through shot from forehead to back that interrupts something essential inside. He’s still moving forward, but his left side seems to be answering his commands just a tick behind the right.

  “Nice,” I hear Charlie say as he lets his bolt go. This time the bolt only parts the in-betweener’s hair as it flies. A sheet of blood pours over his face a few seconds later, so at least his bolt made contact.

  The in-betweener comes to a hesitant stop, one leg wanting to go forward while the other shakes violently. I can hear the sound of Gregory loading another bolt, but we could do this for a good while and it wouldn’t go down. This is a good time for contact.

  “Hold,” I shout and skip forward, machete raised. I can see the moment he focuses on me again, sees in me a meal worth working for. His arms reach for me, so I dart to the side and bring the machete down with all the force I can on the back of his skull.

  I can tell the blade is going to stick just by the way it feels on impact, so I let the momentum of my running swing carry me onward, while I keep a knuckle-white grip on the handle. The force twists the in-betweener’s head on his neck bones violently, and I hear the sharp crack of them breaking even as I feel the blade pull free from the slice I made in his skull.

  I take a few more running steps past him, flinging the goo off my blade as I do and then turn, blade again raised and ready for more. He hasn’t even finished falling yet, it was so fast. I can’t help but feel a smidgen of pride at that move and I shoot a grin toward a very impressed looking Charlie.

  Gregory has almost gotten to the in-betweener, his sledgehammer up and ready for the final finish, but he takes the time to wink at me and say, “Nicely done,” before the hammer falls.

  By the time we’re back on our bikes and on our way, I’m sweating like a pig and roasting under the blazing sun. Here’s a tip for the next time the world gets its crap together and starts manufacturing stuff. Make sure sunscreen will work even after several years in the tube.